PA House committee finally releases important bills

"Something is … different," says Bill Murray's character, Phil Connors, in the classic movie "Groundhog Day." He has been reliving the same day over and over — until now.

"Good or bad?" responds his new girlfriend, Rita.

"Anything different is good," he says.

Advocates for House Bills 832 and 878 must be feeling a bit like Phil Connors. For more than a year, they've been complaining that state House Judiciary Chairman Ron Marsico, R-Dauphin, was keeping this important child sex abuse legislation entombed and refusing to let it come to any kind of discussion or vote. As a matter of fact, I've been one of the people complaining, in several columns and blog posts. For all that time, he stonewalled with the same excuses, when he responded at all, even as the Penn State scandal brought a new sense of urgency to addressing the subject.

Both bills grew out of a grand jury's horrific findings on clergy abuse and cover-ups involving the Philadelphia Archdiocese. HB 832 repealed the statute of limitations from the point of passage forward in civil suits relating to child sex abuse, and HB 878 provided a one-time two-year window for victims to bring civil action in cases barred by the current law.

The Judiciary Committee's minority chairman, Berks Democrat Thomas Caltagirone, has been an even more vocal opponent of statute of limitations changes, so it's not a partisan issue. Rather, it's about deciding whom you think it's most important to protect. The thousands of victims who found their voices too late to satisfy present law? Or the perpetrators, their insurance companies and the institutions that hid and in some cases facilitated these crimes?

By the way, I'm confident that Marsico and Caltagirone weren't the only ones who preferred seeing these bills dead and buried. The party bosses call the important shots, and this one, under pressure from the powerful Pennsylvania Catholic Conference and the Insurance Federation of Pennsylvania, was plenty important.

The Pennsylvania bills almost certainly would be spending the summer in Judiciary Committee cold storage if not for a full-court press employed by their advocates in recent weeks, capped with a press conference Monday in which the bill's sponsors announced they would try to force 832 and 878 onto the House floor by proposing a discharge resolution.

Two days later, the Judiciary Committee was voting on amendments to the bills and sending them to the Rules Committee, where they may actually have a chance of getting to the House floor this fall.

I'll talk about those amendments, one of which is disappointing, in a moment, but the bottom line is that after 15 months of Judiciary Committee entombment, anything different is good.

Tammy Lerner, a child sex abuse survivor and vice president of the Foundation to Abolish Child Sex Abuse, said, "In a matter of two days we went from a very closed down judiciary leadership that didn't want to talk about this to them feeling they had no choice but to talk about it and take action on it. I think that shows extreme progress."

Maureen Martinez of the organization Justice4Pakids said, "Overall, we're moving in the right direction, but it's just a little sad that it has taken this much fighting."

As amended, the bills now collectively eliminate the criminal statute of limitations for child sex abuse cases — a very good addition to the original HB 832 — raise the statute from age 30 to age 50 for civil cases and cap the percentage a lawyer can collect in successful suits. No problem there. But they killed the two-year window, which means victims prevented from suing under the old law will continue to be out of luck. In fact, if you do the math, you'll find that the changed statutes would have no actual impact until 2124, when the first victims not locked into the old law hit 30.

I checked with Amy Hill, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, for her reaction to Wednesday's votes. "The PCC supports the amendment to take the two-year 'window' out of the bill," she wrote. "We believe tougher standards for mandatory reporting and training are really what are needed to help protect children."

Nineteen of the 25 voting committee members, including Bethlehem Democrat Joe Brennan, voted for the amendment to kill the two-year window.

Brennan told me, "I think it's a compromise … I think the two-year window could have opened up floodgates, caused more problems than it would have remedied."

Lerner said it's a fallacy that there would be a flood of bogus cases under the two-year window or that the Catholic Church would be unduly targeted. The difficult standard of proof means only the strongest cases would even make it to court. She concluded, "My message would be: Don't cave in to scare tactics and rhetoric."

Even if the two-year window is lost for this session, just getting what's left of the bills from the Rules Committee to the House floor — and surviving attempts by Caltagirone and others to tack on damaging amendments — will be a difficult task, particularly in an election year.

Still, advocates for the bills are feeling upbeat. Hey, anything different is good.